In Des Moines, Iowa, Congressman Ron Paul gave a stark warning: "The world is facing a major, major crisis. I personally believe it's worse than anything that's ever existed in the world before.” The Republican presidential candidate delivered his grim economic message on the Iowa campaign trail, warning of a global financial meltdown if drastic measures aren’t quickly taken to get on top of the U.S. debt problem.

"As a physician, let me tell you, what we do with our economy, with our money, the monetary system, with the spending and the inflating, it's very similar to treating a drug addict by just giving him another fix, not getting him off the drug," he said to employees of Principal Financial. "The drug of spending and borrowing and printing money and deficit just delays the inevitable." Dr. Paul said that the US addiction to debt is like an alcoholic with a failing liver who refuses to save himself by changing his bad habits.

The Texas congressman expressed dismay that other Republican presidential candidates have treated the crisis so lightly, supporting fed plans to simply print more money and try to “kick the can down the road.”

He said that, if elected, a Paul administration would eliminate several federal cabinets and cut $1 trillion in federal spending during his first year in office. Some of these cuts would come from his effort to abolish the welfare state, end government bailouts, bringing US troops home from around the world and working to revamp the US monetary system.

Earlier this week, Stephen Colbert announced dramatically that there were important developments underway in Europe that we should know about.

True to form, Colbert’s Repor didn’t talk about the big problem. His story, ha ha ha, was about a butter shortage in Norway. Talk about going from the obscure to the ridiculous.

We all know that European countries have been wrestling with what to do about saving the Euro.

There have been warnings of an economic catastrophe if the Euro falls, and its plain that the already shaky American economy will take a big hit if it happens.

The drama in Europe seems to be beyond the ability of both comedy and financial programs to explain. Perhaps it’s more of a divine comedy in the Danteian sense, because we are all perched on the edge of circle of hell that many of us don’t want to wrap our minds around.

While many news outlets prefer to recycle endless soundbites of Gingrich bashing Romney and vice versa, and as American diplomats seem to be cranking up a war against Iran as if that can save the economy the way World War 2 pulled us out of a depression, the world economy is tottering thanks to all the debt American firms sold Europeans who then managed it so stupidly and corruptly.

Now we have Timesman Paul Krugman, for years an economist holding up the liberal middle, finally admitting that nothing is working;

“It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

The Obama Administration, with an election to try to win, is in full panic mode with Tim Geithner hop-scotching all over Europe to try to push Angela Merkel to act, forthwith and with dispatch, to recognize the emergency and pump money at it.

The incendiary finance capitalism unleashed by Britain 25 years ago is at the heart of Europe’s raging debt woes

You either have to admire British Prime Minister David Cameron’s brass neck, or wince at his arrogant stupidity. The smart money is probably on the latter option.

For here you had the British leader heading to the European Union summit convened last week to “salvage” the EU from its the terminal debt crisis – a crisis that is threatening the survival of the Euro single currency, the political future of the European Union and may even be sounding the death knell for the faltering capitalist world economy.

Yet, given the stakes involved, all Cameron wanted to do was exploit the crisis in order to claw further concessions for the City of London’s stock exchange. Such self-serving opportunism was rebuffed by his German and French counterparts, whereupon Cameron stomped his feet and declared that Britain would exercise its veto over EU plans for tighter fiscal controls on member states. The British veto may now hamper the EU’s ability to assuage the financial markets, which are daily extracting pounds of flesh with exorbitant rates of borrowing on government bonds.

Not that the leaders of the other 26 EU states are acting as noble knights in shining armour, vying to protect their populaces from further economic suffering. The revised EU treaty they have in mind will only deepen that suffering by expanding austerity and cutbacks for the majority of people across Europe. The fiscal and economic policies of member states will henceforth be dictated by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. That is, national sovereignty supposedly serving the people, according to their votes, is to be replaced by the rule of unelected bankers and technocrats. In a very real way, the debt crisis of Europe is serving to usher in a dictatorship of finance capitalism. As Paul Craig Roberts noted recently on Global Research with regard to the EU – “the banks have taken over” [1].

Stories from Harlem - Poverty and the daily reality of living in substandard housingby Li OnestoDecember 14, 2011

There's something about elevators and stairwells in high-rise housing projects. If the walls could speak they'd tell a whole lot about what generations of poor Black families have had to endure. Not just the daily reality of living in substandard housing, but the whole way you're treated by the authorities, like you're somehow a criminal.

In Harlem some of the projects are over 20 stories high, with several thousand residents. Lack of adequate city services means basic repairs don't get made, trash cans are always overflowing, there's rat infestation. But it's not just this. Horrible and demeaning living conditions are just one part of what people here have to put up with.

There's another kind of infestation and invasion. Something way more dangerous to people's health. There is the constant knowledge that the housing authority, child services, and other government officials can come down on you at any time. There are the Viper cameras, installed in the entrances and hallways, which mean people are under constant surveillance. It feels a lot like prison. And then there's the POLICE—who serve as a frontline in a concerted and conscious effort by the powers-that-be to repress, control and contain a whole section of society. These armed men roam about, in ones and twos or in packs, sweating people on the streets and in the playgrounds. And for them, a favorite stalking ground is the housing projects where they target especially the youth.

Just look at the reality of the NYPD's official stop-and-frisk policy. The NYPD is on pace to stop and frisk over 700,000 people in 2011, or more than 1,900 people each and every day. The authorities argue this is about stopping crime and "keeping the streets safe." But check out the facts: More than 85 percent of those stopped and frisked are Black or Latino. More than 90 percent of them were not even alleged to be doing something wrong when the police stopped them. All of this is totally and blatantly illegitimate and illegal under the stated laws of this country. And it's not just in New York City that this kind of thing goes on. Throughout the U.S., they might not call it stop-and-frisk, it might not always be a stated policy. But for millions of Black and Latino people, especially the youth, getting stopped, harassed, and made to "assume the position" is a basic fact of life—where if you're "lucky" you won't end up being brutalized or killed. But if you're not, the police report chronicling the last moments of your life might say you were shot because you made a "furtive movement," "looked like a suspect," or doesn't list any reason at all.

This is one step in a pipeline that has locked 2.3 million people in prison. This is one of the "entry points" for a whole repressive trajectory—where the cops, the courts, the whole legal system—feeds mass incarceration.

After watching Europe’s performance last week the only thing they really were after was an ESM, European Stabilization Mechanism, to tie down all EU nations to a tighter regional set up. As it turns out England and others did not agree. Britain obviously does not want to become part of a new treaty that deprives them of their sovereignty. This regional government concept appeared in the early 1960s and is now going to be pushed in Europe with the US to follow. Our question, is England just trying to protect the advantages of the “City of London,” or is the disagreement deeper than that? A new treaty will take two years for ratification, but in the meantime an agreement will hold forth on what can be called a handshake. Evidence is still out on whether this is an attempt by Germany to break up the euro zone and the EU or a genuine effort to set up a platform for world government. We know that since WWII that the internationalists have been setting up Europe as the foundation for world government. On the other hand we know that 65% to 70% of the German people want no part of it from any standpoint.

The main players in the end treated the debt crisis as a secondary problem, probably because the Federal Reserve had it covered for them. The only main player that displayed real nervousness was France’s Sarkozy. France had to have its banks bailed out and had to avoid one or two rating downgrades. Not only would those downgrades entail higher costs, but also they would impair France’s ability to help bailout the six unsound economies. The Fed is bailing out French banks short-term. Once the situation is more stable American short-term bond buyers will return and the Fed can concentrate aiding in other areas. That, of course, is if stability returns. Bailouts can only emanate from central banks and governments and any such operations in and of themselves are inflationary and if persistent will lead to hyperinflation.

This means all of the banks in the solvent countries will have to be nationalized, all or in part. At the same time these same banks and countries have to bail out the dreaded six countries. That will be a tall order, as some are not even cooperating. That could mean three or more of these countries could default leaving sound countries and their banks with big holes in their balance sheets. Overall none of this has been solved, because France and Germany were more interested in changing treaty rules than addressing the debt problem. These massive bailouts are on the way for the sound and the unsound, accompanied by higher inflation. Needless to say, all of this solves nothing on the short to intermediate term. It is another temporary respite. All we see is avoidance. Von Mises has told us only purging the system works. The bankers, politicians and bureaucrats do not want to see that happen, because the key to their power lies in the banking system and once purged their power is lost and countries are free to survive on their own. That is why the world has wars to keep the elitist bankers as our overseers. Under such circumstances nations are forced to amalgamate to bring order and to provide for the common defense. None of us are on the inside, so we do not know which avenue will be taken. Both choices mean lots more trouble ahead. The EU and the euro zone structures do not need to be changed, but the debt problem certainly needs to be addressed.

Bankers rule the world. A new Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study says so. Written by Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston, it's titled "The network of global corporate control," saying:

"We find that transnational corporations from a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic 'super-entity' that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers."

The study says 147 powerful companies control an inordinate amount of economic activity - about 40%. Among the top 50, 45 are financial firms. They include Barclays PLC (called most influential), JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and other familiar and less known names.

Twenty-four companies are US-based, followed by eight in Britain, five in France, four in Japan, and Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands with two each. Canada has one.

Moreover, "top ranked" companies "hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth."

As a result, they have enormous influence over political, financial, and economic activity.

In his book titled, "When Corporations Rule the World," David Korten said they're able to transfer enormous amounts of power, wealth and resources from public to private hands with government complicity. Money power and concentrated wealth in few hands especially harm humanity.

"These forces have transformed" financial institutions and other corporate predators "into instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money" and profits as a be and end all.

Transnational giants are the dominant institution of our time - especially financial ones with money power control of everything.

They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged. Corporate dominance, especially financial power, and democratic values are incompatible.

They operate ruthlessly as private tyrannies. They're predators. We're prey, and every day we're eaten alive. They do it because they can, and in America by mandate.

The Way to Occupy a Bank is to Own Oneby Ellen BrownDecember 16, 2011Web of Debt

The campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to "move our money" - move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks.

Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the 99% Declaration which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia. The 99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Fed to eliminating censorship of the Internet. But none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place – a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.

Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed at doing just that. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled “Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea,” David Weidner writes:

[P]rotesters in the Bay Area, especially Occupy San Francisco, have something their East Coast neighbors don't: a realistic plan aimed at the heart of banks. The idea could be expanded nationwide to send a message to a compromised Washington and the financial industry.

It's called a municipal bank. Simply put, it would transfer the City of San Francisco's bank accounts — about $2 billion now spread between such banks as Bank of America Corp., UnionBanCal Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. — into a public bank. That bank would use small local banks to lend to the community.

The public bank concept is not new. It has been proposed before in San Francisco and has a successful 90-year track record in North Dakota. Weidner notes that the state-owned Bank of North Dakota earned taxpayers more than $61 million last year and reported a profit of $57 million in 2008, when Bank of America had a $1.2 billion net loss. The San Francisco bank proposal is sponsored by city supervisor John Avalos, who has been thinking about a municipal bank for several years.

Bankers rule the world. A new Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study says so. Written by Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston, it's titled "The network of global corporate control," saying:

"We find that transnational corporations from a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic 'super-entity' that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers."

The study says 147 powerful companies control an inordinate amount of economic activity - about 40%. Among the top 50, 45 are financial firms. They include Barclays PLC (called most influential), JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and other familiar and less known names.

Twenty-four companies are US-based, followed by eight in Britain, five in France, four in Japan, and Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands with two each. Canada has one.

Moreover, "top ranked" companies "hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth."

As a result, they have enormous influence over political, financial, and economic activity.

In his book titled, "When Corporations Rule the World," David Korten said they're able to transfer enormous amounts of power, wealth and resources from public to private hands with government complicity. Money power and concentrated wealth in few hands especially harm humanity.

"These forces have transformed" financial institutions and other corporate predators "into instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money" and profits as a be and end all.

MF Global and the great Wall St re-hypothecation scandal12/7/2011 By Christopher Elias (UK)

Business Law Research Note: This version of the article has been modified from the original to make it clear that re-pledged collateral may come from straight repos and not just re-hypothecation. Some of the financial figures from banks' disclosures have been adjusted accordingly.

(Business Law Currents) A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients.

MF Global's bankruptcy revelations concerning missing client money suggest that funds were not inadvertently misplaced or gobbled up in MF’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules that allowed for the wholesale acquisition and sale of client funds through re-hypothecation. A loophole appears to have allowed MF Global, and many others, to use its own clients’ funds to finance an enormous $6.2 billion Eurozone repo bet.

Even though most Americans have become very frustrated with this economy, the reality is that the vast majority of them still have no idea just how bad our economic decline has been or how much trouble we are going to be in if we don't make dramatic changes immediately. If we do not educate the American people about how deathly ill the U.S. economy has become, then they will just keep falling for the same old lies that our politicians keep telling them. Just "tweaking" things here and there is not going to fix this economy. We truly do need a fundamental change in direction. America is consuming far more wealth than it is producing and our debt is absolutely exploding. If we stay on this current path, an economic collapse is inevitable. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers from 2011 that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.

At this time of the year, a lot of families get together, and in most homes the conversation usually gets around to politics at some point. Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help you share the reality of the U.S. economic crisis with your family and friends. If we all work together, hopefully we can get millions of people to wake up and realize that "business as usual" will result in a national economic apocalypse.

The Fed’s third quarter audit data shows a total system debt of 355% and of GDP, in spite of so-called de-leveraging. It is down from the second quarter’s 375% of GDP, but up from 264% a dozen years ago. Financial sector borrowing fell almost 50% in the quarter but non-financial debt increased while financial debt fell – a push so to speak. Unfortunately most of the debt growth emanated from Washington. That growth was $557 billion, of at a 14.1% annualized rate. Of course, what the federal government is doing is the antithesis of what they should be doing. Will these borrowings and debt continue, of course they will.

In 13 quarters Treasury debt is up $100 trillion an increase of almost $4.9 trillion, or by 92%. In three years Treasury debt rose from 16.2% of non-financial debt to 26.7% and total federal debt has increased from 46% of GDP to 78% of GDP. In 2007 federal non-financial debt grew from 3.3%. In 2010 it was 113%. Year-on-year total compensation rose only 2.8% as real inflation grew 11.6%. During that period corporate earnings set records. For the most part those earnings were achieved via layoffs. From the second thru the third quarters household debt fell 1.2% from a minus 0.6% and mortgage debt fell 1.8%, as consumer credit rose 1.2%.

Funding especially foreign funds of US bank branches has been wild and the Fed has done its best to obscure what they are up too. It looks like these foreign bank balances grew about $2.6 trillion.

The result is that pressure was relieved in Europe and the US went sideways in spite of massive increases in money and credit. Fed issuance is in a bubble and it is only a question of when it pops. It is not surprising that the American public believes we are headed in the wrong direction, some 70%. Only 39% approve of the administration’s financial policies. The GOP frontrunner Gingrich, if he ran against Obama today would lose 50% to 41%. It shows you how dumb Republicans are. Nominating a crook who is a guaranteed loser.

THE HOTTEST QUESTION IN EUROPE: Did The ECB Just Pull Off A Back-Door Bailout That Will End The Crisis?Simone Foxman | Dec. 16, 2011

Yields on short-term peripheral sovereign bonds are plunging, despite the fact that EU leaders appeared to make little progress at their highly-anticipated summit last week.

Pundits continue to expound on the flaws of the eurozone but markets are telling a different tale.

That's because the European Central Bank may have already introduced roundabout measures that will solve some of Europe's big problems — it's making investing in peripheral sovereign debt a huge profit opportunity for banks.

Theoretically, financial institutions will be able coin money by borrowing ultra-cheap from the ECB and buying higher yielding sovereign debt.Read more: [link to www.businessinsider.com]

As announced in previous GEABs, in this issue our team presents its anticipations on the changes in the United States for the period 2012-2016. This country, the epicentre of the global systemic crisis and pillar of the international system since 1945, will go through a particularly tragic in its history during these five years. Already insolvent it will become ungovernable bringing about, for Americans and those who depend on the United States violent and destructive economic, financial, monetary, geopolitical and social shocks. If the United States today is already very different from the "super-power" of 2006, the year the first GEAB was published, announcing the global systemic crisis and the end of the all-powerful US, the changes we anticipate for the 2012-2016 period are even more important, and will radically transform the country's institutional system, its social fabric and its economic and financial weight.

At the same time, every December, we evaluate our anticipations for the year just ended. This exercise, too rarely practiced by the think tanks, experts and media (1) is a tool enabling our subscribers (2) as well as our researchers to verify that our work retains a high added-value and and is in direct contact with reality. This year our score improved slightly and LEAP/E2020 attained an 82% success rate in its anticipations for 2011.

In addition we also detail our recommendations on foreign currencies, gold, stock exchanges and the consequences of the United Kingdom’s marginalization within the EU (3) on the Pound, Gilts and UK debt and we set out some advice on developments of the American institutional system (4).

In this public communiqué we have chosen to present an excerpt from our anticipation on the changes in the United States for the 2012-2016 period.

But before addressing the American case, we wish to review the situation in Europe (5).

The Top 100 Statistics About The Collapse Of The Economy That Every American Voter Should Know

The U.S. economy is dying and most American voters have no idea why it is happening. Unfortunately, the mainstream media and most of our politicians are not telling the truth about the collapse of the economy. This generation was handed the keys to the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen, and we have completely wrecked it. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have left us drowning in an ocean of corruption, greed and bad debt. Thousands of businesses and millions of jobs have left the country and poverty is exploding from coast to coast. We are literally becoming a joke to the rest of the world. It is absolutely imperative that we educate America about what is happening. Until the American people truly understand the problems that we are facing, they will not be willing to implement the solutions that are necessary.

The following are the top 100 statistics about the collapse of the economy that every American voter should know....

#100 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#99 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

#98 Since Barack Obama was sworn in, the share of the national debt per household has increased by $35,835.

#97 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.

#96 It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will hit 344% of GDP by the year 2050 if we continue on our current course.

#95 The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that U.S. government debt held by the public will reach a staggering 716 percent of GDP by the year 2080.

#94 In 2010, the U.S. government paid $413 billion in interest on the national debt. That is projected to at least double over the next decade.

#93 According to one new survey, one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.

#92 State and local government debt has reached an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP.

#91 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.

#90 U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

Exactly ten years ago Argentina suffered a full-scale financial and governmental collapse. That was the end-result of over a decade of doing exactly what the IMF, international bankers, rating agencies and global “experts” told us to do.

Then President Fernando de la Rúa kept applying all IMF recipes to the very last minute, making us swallow their poisonous “remedies”.

It all began getting really ugly in early 2001 when De la Rúa could no longer service Argentina’s “sovereign debt” even after driving the country into full “deficit zero” mode, slashing public spending, jobs, health, education and key public services.

By March 2011, he had brought back Domingo Cavallo as finance minister, a post Cavallo had already held for six years in the nineties under then-President Carlos Menem, imposing outrageous IMF deregulation and privatization policies that weakened the state and led straight to the 2001 collapse.

Well, it wasn’t really De la Rúa who brought back Cavallo but rather David Rockefeller (JPMorgan Chase) and William Rhodes (CitiCorp), who personally came to Buenos Aires to tell/order President De la Rúa to name Cavallo… or else!

So, by June 2001, Cavallo – a Trilateral Commission member and Soros-Rockefeller-Rhodes protégé – tried to allay a default by engineering a new sovereign debt bond mega-swap which increased public debt by $51 billion, but did not avert total collapse that December.

The budget agreement passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama Saturday puts in place cuts for the current fiscal year that target social spending, particular energy assistance and education.

One of the biggest single cuts comes in low-income heating assistance, which is slashed 25 percent, or $1.2 billion, compared to last year’s figure. This cut is particularly cruel, coming at the onset of winter, and insuring that tens of thousands of poor and elderly people will face the danger of hypothermia and potential death.

Another $1.4 billion was cut from labor, health and education spending, including $225 million from the outright elimination of 22 separate programs, many of them related to job training.

An estimated 100,000 youth will be cut off Pell grants, the main program for aiding low-income college students, and the maximum amount of the grant will be frozen at $5,500 for another year, forcing millions of students to bear the brunt of sharply rising tuition and fees. Total cuts in Pell grants, spread over several years, come to $1.36 billion.

The basic outlines of the budget were determined by the bipartisan agreement last August that raised the federal debt ceiling and set limits on the total amount of spending for the current fiscal year, which began September 30. Both the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House adhered to these ceilings.

The House passed a $915 billion omnibus appropriations bill that combined the spending for 10 federal departments — including Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor — as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, into a single 1,200-page bill.Continue: [link to globalresearch.ca]